Somehow my hometown, the good old Steel City, has been saddled with a reputation it doesn’t really have: that of factory workers, of coal miners, of people who don’t care if the air is smoky. You can find pictures of a Pittsburgh with a nearly black atmosphere—but none were taken in recent years. My parents used to take me to the Carnegie Library, built a century earlier with the steel magnate’s money. I thought it was made of some kind of black stone, and one day in 1990 I was shocked to see it being painted white. Why are they doing that? I asked.

My mom and dad both laughed. “They’re cleaning off the soot!”

Steel is our history, not our future.

Steel is our history, not our future. Pittsburgh wasn’t choked with smoke in my lifetime, thanks to the Clean Air act of 1963 and the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s. President Trump is half a century too late; steel manufacturing isn’t coming back.

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Coal mining is even older; there are mines in other parts of Pennsylvania but the ones in our city are abandoned. In the neighborhood where I grew up, many of the houses had cracks in their brickwork because the ground underneath us included spent coal mines. One house on my street had to have its basement rebuilt. Another time, a sinkhole opened up just a few blocks from home.

Pittsburghers have plenty of experience with the attitude that goes “screw the environment, let’s do whatever makes money.” It’s what we’ve been working for decades to clean up. Pittsburgh is a poster city for how to recover after coal and steel and manufacturing have fucked everything up.

Look at us now. Who are the biggest employers in Pittsburgh? Not mills, not factories. Our biggest employers are a hospital and a university. In fact, seven of the top 10 are in the health care industry. United States Steel, squeezed between Walmart and the City of Pittsburgh itself, does make number 13 on the list. But that’s its corporate headquarters. Browse their listings for hourly jobs, and there’s only one at the moment: a railway car repair person.

Pittsburgh is a poster city for how to recover after coal and steel and manufacturing have fucked everything up.

I’m not saying we’re perfect. Fracking is big business in our rural surrounding areas, and poses its own environmental issues that need to be taken care of. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council just held a summit here to discuss how to reduce our dependence on coal-fired power plants. Our state produces a lot of greenhouse gases, and exports a lot of the country’s electricity. We’re on track to reduce emissions by a third by 2030, but need to go much farther. And so does the rest of the country.

We have a lot in common with the rest of the US on that count. Check out this data from Yale’s Climate Communication project on how people feel about reducing CO2 as a pollutant. A majority of us, in every single state, think this is something we need to do. And check out Pittsburgh’s color on the map: we’re not yellow or peach or orange. Pittsburgh pops out in cherry red. We know what’s up.

Pittsburgh has its Trump voters, to be sure, but when people here go to the voting booth, there’s no mandate for officials who will take us back to Smoky City days. Take our mayor, for example, who tweeted this in reaction to the Paris news:

So, Mr. President, if you want to represent the people of Pittsburgh, you’ll need to re-think your stance on Paris.